Swedish Pension Fund Lends Their Eagle Eye to the Golden Eye Review

I recently had the privilege of participation in one of Goldcorp’s Golden Eye Reviews when we kicked off our 2012 schedule of Golden Eye Reviews by heading to the highlands of Guatemala.

Introduced in 2005, the Golden Eye Review is a unique approach to safety that focuses on the practical aspects of our operations and conducts an in-depth review of our safety processes, programs and activities through the eyes of our peers, from all parts of the organization, not just safety experts. Team observations and findings are put through a risk-ranking exercise and profiled as extreme, high, medium or low-risk depending on the likelihood, exposure and result. The review aims to analyze and improve behavioural and safety implementation at the site, and also highlights a number of good practices. Although the Golden Eye Review is designed to be an internal process, the review at Marlin this year added an element of external participation, further demonstrating the strength and independence of the results.

As a relative newcomer to Goldcorp, I was thrilled to be able to return to Marlin since my last visit in 2008, but more on that later. I was especially excited to take part in the Golden Eye Review, knowing full well I was going to come back to Vancouver having learned a lot about Marlin, but also about other sites as team members are candid in sharing challenges and best practices from their own sites. In anticipation of the week, I even secured my own steel-toed boots.

This is a first for Goldcorp and many might ask why we’d include external stakeholders in an internal safety review? The long answer is well…long – the Fourth Swedish National Pension Fund (AP4) has a mandate to take into account ethical dimensions in their work and together with other investors and advisors who focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) analysis, they are part of our corporate stakeholder engagement work.

This is AP4’s and GES’ second visit to Marlin – the first one occurred in February 2008 along with other socially responsible investors from Canada (which is my former world, and is why I travelled to Marlin and how I got to know Goldcorp in the first place). We think including our stakeholders in the Golden Eye Review gives them a clearer understanding of our operations and through the safety lens; it is another avenue for enhancing our commitment to transparency, engagement and dialogue.

From February 13th to the 17th, the entire team was put to work and over those days we took pictures, wrote notes, asked questions, debated risk-rankings and presented our scenarios to Marlin’s senior management. Time and time again, we were impressed with the positive work environment, attention to detail and willingness to act. In fact, a number of the observations that we noted were resolved by the time our final presentation was made.

We believe in the value of transparency. What better way to showcase Goldcorp’s six pillars (growth of: people, partnerships, safety, margins, production, reserves), our operational practices as well the professionalism of our workforce than to show them first-hand.
- Dominique Ramirez, Manager, Corporate Affairs and CSR